 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Hi-Tech Oki, Logan Larson, and Mike Aikens. Coming up on DTNS, Plex wants to be your streaming home, can they pull it off? Plus, YR slash place might mean hope for humanity, and Windows File Explorer got tabs! This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, April 5th, 2022, First Contact Day, in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Mair. And from Studio Redmond, I'm Sarah Lane. Also in Los Angeles, I'm Lamar Wilson. And on the show's producer, Roger Chang. We have got a barrel full of tech news to roll your way. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Apple announced that its Worldwide Developer Conference, aka the WWDC, will take place on June 6th through the 10th. This year's conference will be online only, though there will be a limited opportunity for some to watch the opening keynote at Apple headquarters. Following up on yesterday's discussion about Elon Musk buying a passive quote-unquote stake in Twitter, the company announced that Musk has been granted a seat on the board. Now his stake is still passive, but he will be less so, I imagine. The terms of his board seat prevent him from acquiring more than 14.9% of Twitter's stock during his two-year term. So he has 9. something percent right now. He can increase that only so far. He cannot take over Twitter while he is on this board. Reuters sources say Musk will have a say in strategic decisions, so they'll ask him about things like open standards like the Project Blue Sky and the addition of an edit button, which he tweeted about yesterday, but he will not weigh in on moderation policies. Epic Games officially released Unreal Engine 5. The release includes the Nanite geometry system that scales gracefully and maintains frame rates with objects that have millions of polygons. Lumen can dynamically adapt to game conditions like Time of Day or a character's light source like a flashlight. Lumen was also used in the Matrix Awakens tech demo. Other changes make work easier for developers, especially hand-developing open worlds. So Lumen, do they watch? Sevens? I'm just wondering. Good news on the supply chain front. The Chevy Bolt has been out of production since August due to battery fire risk. It was supposed to restart production in September, but the supplies and the chains they run on were not cooperative. Well, the Detroit News now reports that GM has finally resumed production of the Chevy Bolt EV and EUV. Amazon has signed a deal to launch up to 83 satellites for its internet service called Project Kuiper. Partners in the launches include Iran Space United Launch Alliance and Bezos' own Blue Origin. Project Kuiper expects to launch two prototypes this year with and eventually deploy 3,236 satellites over the next five years. Project Kuiper will join SpaceX's Starling, which has around 2,000 satellites already in orbit, and around 250,000 subscribers. Amazon Web has more than 400 satellites in orbit, so a little bit less, but also works with SpaceX for launches. Canada's telecast aims to launch service in 2026 and is focusing on government and secure contracts. All right, let's talk a little more about Microsoft's future of hybrid work event that was streamed on Tuesday. Here are some of the highlights announced by Sacha Nadella, Panos Panay and the team. None of these announcements came with a release date, by the way. So I'm just going to say that right up front so that we don't have to sit here going, this one didn't get a release date either. Windows 365 cloud PCs were announced last July. They let you stream a Windows PC to a web browser starting at $20 per person per month. They launched in August and now they're getting a feature called Cloud Boot. That lets you boot straight to your Windows 365 cloud PC from a device. So you log in, if you log into the local machine, you go to the local machine, but if you log into your Windows 365 PC, you go to that instead. This is positioned as being good for shared computers or somebody who's bringing their own device and wants to have their local stuff stay non-work and then they log into the cloud PC for the work stuff. There's also Windows 365 switch. That will allow one of the Windows 365 cloud PCs to be used as a virtual desktop in task view. And then you can switch between your local machine and the cloud machine. Microsoft called it Task Switcher during the announcement. So I don't know, maybe that's getting a rename. Working on Windows 365 offline as well. Not a feature they're ready to ship at a date they're not specifying, but they're saying they're working on this. That'll let you work without a connection and then sync once you reconnect to the internet. And there's a Windows 365 app coming. That'll let you launch a cloud PC from the task bar or the start menu. But you all think of this. Yeah, so my first question was like for the cloud boot and the switcher, like if you had a Mac, are you saying you can log in? No, no, these are Windows 11 features. I've got a Windows machine and I want to be able to boot either into the local machine or the Windows 365. You can still access a Windows 365 machine from a Mac, but you can't do the cloud. But these are coming to Windows. I know as a Mac person, this is always the question that we ask and everyone else rolls their eyes. But I was like, that seems like something that would have been offered already. I mean, this is a great feature, right? The idea to be able to boot locally or boot to the cloud, a lot of people would take advantage of this, particularly in a group setting. Alright, let's talk about some of the Windows 11 conferencing features that were announced. Intelligent meeting features include voice focus that will remove unwanted audio, background noise and compression, basically. Eye contact, which you could do on the Surface Pro X, will be coming to Windows 11 in general. This uses AI to make it look like you're looking at the camera. Automatic framing, make sure you're always in focus, even if you stand up or move around. And portrait background blur doesn't mean you're in portrait aspect ratio. It just means you look like a portrait. It softens the environment around you rather than the abrupt blurring that sometimes happens where it's like right next to your face. These, I said, are coming to Windows in general, but I lied. They're coming to Qualcomm-powered devices, so ARM-based Windows. And they're using Qualcomm's neural processing units for that. Lenovo's ThinkPad X13's will be the first to get it. A separate feature called voice clarity is going to show up on the Surface Laptop Studio in April because it takes advantage of the mics that are in the Surface Laptop Studio. They eliminate echo and allow simultaneous audio communication across apps. So you can be in different apps at the same time. What do you think of these conferencing features? Eye contact scares me. I saw the video. It just looks really freaky. I love that technology exists like that. What do you mean, Lamar? Exactly. As you're looking down, what do you mean? No, but all in all, I love the conference features. Like Sarah kind of said, I feel like long overdue. But again, the whole frame of this was hybrid work. So Microsoft pretty much had to scramble. They were mentioning in a conference that the little part that I watched, everybody thought Windows 10 was going to be the end, and they thought so too, but things happened, and a pandemic happened. So they had to adjust. I'm glad to see these things are coming. And to your point about long time coming, none of these features are new features, but they're now available in Windows. I don't want that to get lost on people. This is like, yeah, you could do this in Teams, but now it's in Windows so any app can take advantage of it because it's there across the platform. Actually to clarify that, sir. I mean, how many, just, you know, spitballing here, how many collaborative efforts would be like, Teams isn't for us, but this is. Zoom. This is Zoom. Well, okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's the first one that came to mind because everybody uses Zoom. Well, a lot of people use Teams. Sure, there are. There are a lot of people who use Teams. I will not dispute that. All right. A few other notes from the event. It's official. Windows 11 File Explorer is getting tabs. They can even be moved around. Finally. Finally, it's official. File Explorer also getting a new homepage with a new favorites option. You can right click to add a file to the favorites. IT admins will be able to send messages to managed machines that'll show up on the lock screen on the desktop or above the taskbar. If you were worried about that, edge notification meaning advertisements. No, it means this. It means you IT admins can send messages now. That's what it was demonstrating. And a version of TeamViewer for Enterprise that's called Microsoft Advanced Management gives you remote IT help integrated with Azure Active Directory for increased security. And it is the first of several add-ons to endpoint management. Well, on Friday, Reddit users decided to collectively generate a new app that will be available and they decided to collectively generate a massive collaborative piece of artwork as one does when you're on Reddit with a lot of your friends. Reddit's r slash place was a subreddit that's part open canvas where each user could post a single colored pixel every five minutes. This resurrected project began as an April Fool's Day experiment in 2017 with more than a million Reddit users placing, rather, about 16 million tiles on the blank communal digital canvases. The new version had nearly 72 million tiles placed by over 6 million users at a pace of more than 2.5 million tiles placed per hour. A lot of people were really into this. The fun is that each user could only place a tile every five minutes. For example, r slash trees and r slash Ukraine filled the space with a large marijuana leaf and a Ukrainian flag, respectively. Users from r slash Star Wars recreated an entire movie poster and the trans community placed a massive trans flag on screen. Sadly for all of us, the latest version of the project ended at 9 p.m. on Monday. And by the way, this all started by Josh Bortle, the creator. He did the 2017 one. He's obviously not at Reddit anymore. He's counting his money from New York Times. Exactly. Partly from the mind of Josh Bortle. I think the coolest thing about this was watching the different communities sometimes collaborate and will give you space to do your thing and help defend you if you help defend us because everybody could come in and overwrite everybody else. So some people were just in charge of turning every black pixel back into the right color or keeping the nearby part of the canvas from encroaching on your space. And you might think that this would immediately be covered with genitalia and Nazi flags, but it wasn't. It showed that the internet is predominantly people who like memes and stuff. They like Minecraft and Kirby's and Pokemon. And the people who did try to do the nefarious stuff quickly drowned out because there was enough of the rest of us here. Yeah, I thought it was pretty fascinating. You mentioned a couple. I was going to mention some of the gaming ones that kind of caught my eye. Frogger, Froggy chair, Pokemon, Minecraft, as you say, little Kirby's. It just shows all these different communities, like you said, just kind of gather together. People were trying to do things and they were quickly, you know, kicked out of there or their stuff was overwritten. So in the end, a beautiful piece of artwork was created. And while there were battles, there were also alliances. Nintendo Life points out that the Hollow Knight community and the Ori and the Blind Forest community came together. I didn't know they had a fight before. Bordering country flags were declaring truces with tiny hearts lining the border between them. And all of this was powered by communities getting together on their discords and other subreddits and things like Geneva and just talking it out and saying, okay, here's our strategy. Let's all jump in there and make a part of the canvas. To me, this shows that the internet and humanity, the humanity that makes up the internet is still healthy. And what we see over amplified by algorithms on social media platforms is not representative of what people are up to out there. Because this was open to everybody. There was no algorithm elevating anybody above anybody else. Anybody can come in and put a pixel. The only limit was you had to wait five minutes to put your next one. And now we go for world hunger with the group. We can do it, guys. Yeah, I mean, I know. Okay, fine. Does it actually solve anything? I don't know. But at least it's indicative that we're not lost as a species. It's not going to not raise awareness if somebody wanted to make that part of the game kind of thing. I mean, that's sort of the beauty of this is everybody can have a little fun but it can also be a place where like-minded folks can get together and say, yeah, we're all going to do this. Yeah. No, go ahead, Lamar. I wasn't actually trying to be cynical. I was hopeful that because this gets together that when internet gets together and does and whereas, you know, charity to Ukraine or other things, we can do it. So like, you know, I love the start of this. Maybe we can start tackling bigger things that governments are not able to do because of red tape, you know. So I'm actually being very really hopeful. Yeah, no, I get you now. I'm not saying that our place is going to save humanity, but I do think it indicates that, you know, if we're given the right motivations, in this case, it was fun. We can collaborate with each other and we can even fight politely, you know, and put little hearts on the borders between us. It's it's not perfect. There were definitely fights. There were definitely attempts to vandalize. But overall, I thought it ended up, you know, showing humanity in a better light than we usually think of it these days, at least on the internet. Well, if you have a thought about something I just said or something the Mara Sarah just said, but you don't know our email address, let me fix that for you. It's feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com Plex rolled out new features Tuesday to try to get folks to make Plex the main app for your TV watching. The first of the new features is Universal Search. You can now search in the Plex app by title, genre or collection collection, meaning like Star Wars movies or Marvel movies. You can also search by people. Right now, that's limited to thing in your own media collection, but they do intend to bring that to the wider search. And when you say, well, what's the wider search, all the apps that you could possibly be using either paid or free, they have more than 450 services in the index. So this isn't about your Plex server, although that's included. This is about everything you could watch on the internet or at least as much as they could get indexed users can select the services they subscribe to as defaults and then search results will show up with items from your Plex server first, if you have one, then from streaming services that you set as defaults followed by any other services that offer the show, which can be useful if none of the things you have have it. And you're like, well, maybe I should start using that one. Next is Universal Watch List. So search lets you find out if something's available. Watch List you can use to then add it to a list. You can add a show and then get notified when it becomes available on a service you subscribe to. Maybe it's on stars that you don't get stars, but if it moves to Netflix or Showtime and you have those, this will let you know, hey, it's available now. It'll also notify you if it moves from one service to another. This works across platforms wherever you have the Plex app installed items on the watch list will show in the order that you added them and it will include Plex's DVR as well as Plex's own ad supported free streaming. Now in both these cases, the search in the watch list, you select to watch a show and it will start playing the show in the associated app. There's no like having to go into the app and select it again. It just starts playing using something called deep linking deep links to the content itself. Finally, there's Discover. This has rows of recommendations of things like trending trailers, top shows from the services you selected as your defaults, new stuff that's available on your defaults or for purchase. It can also highlight rows from single services. They might have a here's new stuff on Netflix row. Eventually it will use social features to add personalization. All of these features are available for free. There is no need to subscribe to Plex Pass to get any of the stuff I was just talking about. The key to getting people to use this and making it better is that deep linking. Plex has apps on all the major platforms so it's easy to get on the thing you want to use and the linking works on almost all of them. Android mobile, iOS, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV and Apple TV. It's working on getting it going on Samsung and LG. The major platform it doesn't have is Roku. They're in talks with Roku, but it doesn't work there yet. Plex also plans to open all three features to its API so that third parties can build fun tools that take advantage of all this that Plex might not have time to build. I'm a Plex stan. I've got three Plex servers that I'm a part of and the whole idea of searching and organizing content is an ongoing thing. You can always just search for something if you don't find it, but the idea of universal search and also the discover area of it which right now if anybody is not familiar with Plex if you just go ahead and fire up Plex I use it on my Apple TV app, but obviously you have other options but if you don't even have belong to any Plex server you're not organizing your own media anything like that it will sort of go like okay well here's a bunch of stuff on Plex that you could watch that is available to you for free and that's fine but the discover sounds like what it's going to do is actually make that much more relevant and not just sort of like these are like the dumb movies that Plex is able to give me kind of thing which we're all aware of on various networks it can tie into a lot of the other services that you're using. And you're right out there person who's thinking this right now every platform Roku, Apple and Samsung has search but they fall short of comprehensive listings which leaves folks go into third parties like just watch to really find out what's up here Plex is making a play to say we want to be as comprehensive as just watch already on your device Sarah is your regular Plex user and it seems like this appeals to you Lamar you definitely are a streamer but you don't use Plex what do you think of this stuff? Yeah so I haven't used Plex in about 12 years or so a little bit after it came out so one of my biggest headaches I have almost every streaming service and I have Apple TV one of my biggest headaches is trying to search or like you mentioned just watch having to go there or jump from app to app to see oh is this movie here or is this show here and it's annoying so I the universe of watch list is the most excuse me universal search is the most intriguing to me here I think that will solve a lot of problems Apple TV for instance I don't believe Netflix lets them do the the universal search thing I could be wrong if that's They're not in the watch list on Apple TV and they're not in the universal search either one So it's things like this they have them but it always falls a little short so I actually tried I thought this was Plex was something that people who sorry Sarah but who pirate movies have on there to like grab free movie I just I didn't know that this was actually legitimate type of service so the news to me and I mean it is what you make it right I'm yeah certainly people who are doing that using Plex but I mean they could use that doing lots of different services absolutely no I'd be the thing about Plex that I have loved for a long time is the way that it can just you know let's get all the things in one place and I very rarely even you know when I'm sort of like you know sitting back to watch TV for the night and I pretty much watch everything on on Apple TV it's like YouTube TV or Plex even though I have lots of other apps it's like those are the those are the easiest ones however there are certain apps that aren't integrated with Plex and this sounds like they will be and that is great yeah fascinating about us I use Apple TV for most of this stuff the universal search not as much so that that is a big like you say Lamar that that's a big attraction the watch list on Apple TV is pretty good even though Netflix isn't a part of it and I want to see how Plex handles that because what Apple TV is very good at is always showing you the next episode and when a new episode comes out like on Thursday when the new severance comes out it puts it at the front for you really want Plex to be doing that too and I couldn't tell if that's how it handles it or not or if you have to go click in and then look at the episodes but but I'm going to try this I'm I'm attracted to by what what they're doing and like you say Lamar I think a lot of people are into the misimpression that Plex doesn't that mean piracy it hasn't ever meant that not that Sarah is wrong some people have certainly used it for that but Plex doesn't encourage that and all of their features over the past five or six years have been very much oriented towards just streaming stuff yeah you know yeah making sense of the streaming you're already doing yeah yeah absolutely thanks for sharing this one this is really eye-opening I'm excited about this well you might be excited about this one too Lamar Samsung released its new Q-Led frame TV with a med display and it's apparently stunned reviewers like the Verges Gris Welch the frame is meant to look like a picture font on the wall when it's not playing video so it can be programmed to show images of art that sort of thing the new matte display means no glare either that's kind of a giveaway that you're looking at a TV if you had a TV on the wall that you were using to I don't know go through photos otherwise still has 4k resolution and 120 hertz refresh rate at sizes bigger than 55 inches and the new frame comes in more sizes from 43 inches at $1000 to 85 inches for more than $4000 so depending on what your budget is I would say the 85 inch one is at the high end of the budget but this could be a kind of fun thing for the wall if you're looking for some artwork slash television yeah I think so a few years ago I had LG's wallpaper TV that was considerably more expensive than this disclosure they did send it out but it was old it still had that glare look people you can still kind of tell it's a TV this I mean I have to see in person if it looks just like the article was saying people have to walk up and like wait there's no way this is a TV so that sounds really exciting we were this close to getting the 43 inch version of this the previous version the glary version as you would call it now and then we moved our furniture around and got the other TV in a place where you could see it in the dining room but we wanted to have a TV in the dining room that we could keep an eye on a game or something while we were eating but then it wouldn't look like a TV when we weren't using it and I think the use cases are not wide this is certainly not the best TV you could buy at the price but certainly in the right situation now that it's matte especially it really looks like a picture that's pretty cool sort of like office scenarios there's plenty of hallways and doctors office I don't know I mean there are plenty of situations where you might go very cool there's definitely that hipster feeling of like I don't want to feel like I have a TV when you walk in my room I'm kind of anti TV until I want to watch it alright let's check out the mail bag alright this one comes from mark in Detroit, Michigan mark says I imagine one huge benefit of these visio ad overlays this is what we were talking about yesterday two advertisers is that one probably won't be able to fast forward through them like a DVR could just a thought I don't see why you wouldn't I guess the way I read the article was that they might not show up if you're using a DVR they might be tied to the live stream the live broadcast but that was the impression that I got as well I don't think there would be any problem with them on DVR again they're just a banner that they're making clickable so I don't know we got an email from Nate who was like the problem was they announced it if they'd just done it no one would have noticed or thought it was cool and I'm like yeah but we needed to announce it so that advertisers know it's out there like you can't put a press release out for only a few people when you put a press release out everybody can look at it so it's not like they were promoting it to you Nate or anyone else they were trying to get the word out to the people at networks and stuff that'd be like oh this exists great good to know also Scott sent an email in asking about battery repairs with Samsung's right to repair program he's like where's the support for batteries turns out according to the Verge, Rich Strafilino our producer found this the battery replacement option is missing because the battery is connected to the display so when you replace the display you'll also replace the battery because of the way Samsung connects them they're pre-glued so we talked quite a bit about that and why that's good or bad on good day internet the extended version of the show available to patrons but there you go Scott you can replace the battery you just also have to replace the display at the same time well thanks everybody who listens to the show writes in with feedback please keep it coming we really appreciate your feedback feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send that email also thanks to Lamar Wilson for being on the show today Lamar what's been going on since we saw you last? Doing a lot of short form pop culture related vertical content you know the looks like TikTok but it could be everywhere and that's really exciting from unboxings to getting into some more gaming content so if you're interested in that I'm at Lamar Wilson everywhere on the internet well we're so glad to have you on the show today thanks for being with us also so glad to have a brand new boss that brand new boss's name is Mark Mark just started backing us on Patreon thank you Mark we're even more excited about Mark than we were about tabs in Windows File Explorer I mean and that's saying something there's a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet we're rolling right into it after this episode of Daily Tech News Show it's available at patreon.com slash DTNS reminder we're live on DTNS Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 200 UTC find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live we are back doing it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson talk to you then 4 30 p.m. Eastern this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com now both of us said 4 30 p.m. Eastern it's 4 p.m. Eastern I said 4 p.m. Eastern